Overall, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions is not your typical card game. It adds some simple rotation changes that end up adding a thick layer of strategy to the entire gameplay design. All of this sits on top of neat and well thought through card designs and is driven by a solid difficulty arc that forces you to learn the ins/outs of the gameplay.
Somewhere deep down inside there is a part of me that is just an absolute sucker for card games. Hearthstone was where I cut my teeth on the genre, followed up by The Elder Scrolls: Legends, where I last left off. I’m not sure where the fascination comes from, but it is an irresistible genre that, when offered, I cannot pass up. All of this leads me into the review for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions, a Warhammer-based card game that proves that the genre can get a lot more complicated, and not just cookie-cutter.
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions has some of the standard features that any card game comes with — you get to collect, mix-match decks, while having a bevy of categories for those decks (four initially). Each deck is broken up into specific themes, which include chaos (a monster driven horror show), and the main focus for my Warhammer-ing. Before I move away to the technical reasons each deck exists, let me just spend a moment discussing the art.
I have seen art in card games and have reveled in the beauty of it with such games as The Elder Scrolls: Legends (it has solid presentation). I’m sure that artists can spend quite a bit of time on cards when they don’t have to necessarily animate the characters living within them, which can lead to some extraordinarily beautiful works of art. That said, I think that Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions might feature the most beautiful artwork that I’ve seen in a card game. It’s somewhere between H.R. Giger’s horror show work that inspired the Alien series and pretty much everything Danzig, while also maintaining a D&D flavor to remind you of the universe it lives within. Regardless of comparison, I found myself dazzled by the art presented on each card to the point of distraction from the card’s purpose. For the first hour of the game, I probably found myself choosing the card that looked the coolest, rather than the most useful. That, folks, is good art.
As for the reason you want to play this title, the gameplay, as stated above, is incredibly standard for card games when it comes to end goals. The basic structure has you pulling the right cards, competing against other cards, and essentially out-strategizing your opponent to survive battles. Really nothing special to dial home about.
The game begins with choosing where your champions go, champions are your main characters in your deck with particular attributes attached to them, which helps to lay down the groundwork for strategy that you’ll need later on in the game. The gameplay allows for you to see what your opponent is doing, which in turn allows you to counter their movements with champion placement. Using particular champions helps in developing the best methods to win. It’s simple, but also important.
From there, the game requests you take turns in randomly choosing cards to lay down in champion spaces. Cards come in a wide variety, and not all cards fit all spaces. The latter means that you can only use specific cards with specific champion spaces. For example, wizard-based cards only work in wizard spaces, thus the reason why champion positioning is essential. This sort of complication isn’t too far off what you’ll find in other card games, so to this point the game is doing what everyone else is doing. The learning curve isn’t that bad when it comes to strategically being on point with these card/champion decisions.
The place where Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions starts separating itself from the rest of card games is how attacks occur, as well as how specials are activated. In all honesty, not that I’ve been lying to you the entire review, the learning curve in understanding how this next part of the gameplay design works was a bit of frustrating and confusing at first. Even after going through the tutorials, the functionality and design of how rotation and champion attacks work was felt like I was learning something complicated, like my 10th-grade Geometry experience, where I just wanted to move onto Algebra. Anyway, high school nightmares aside, as the game says after the tutorials if you’re confused you’ll eventually get it after a few games.
You know what? They were right. And thank GOD because I was terrified at the prospect of doing this review with no real grasp on how the game functioned. I probably would have retired as a game reviewer.
Anyway, the game features a rotation system that helps with the gameplay. The rotation system is an interesting addition to the card genre with respect to gameplay design. When you choose a card from your pile it has certain numbers hanging around the edges of it. The numbers represent damage points, and sometimes cards have multiple damage points attached to them in each corner of the card. With every round of gameplay, the damage points rotate until there are no more points available, which then pushes the card back to its deck and out of play. Sometimes your powerful cards have ‘X’ in place of the numbers, which means you have to wait for a round or two (or three) before the card unleashes its power. All of the above is strategy waiting to happen (or fail). The rotating points end up being decisions you have to make to either use or not use particular cards at particular times. It’s cerebral gameplay design that makes the game a helluva lot deeper than it should be.
The rotation system doesn’t stop at individual cards. There is a rotation system in place for your champions as well, which leads to special attacks/defenses. How the rotation works on this end is that the cards you place down have particular symbols on them, such as red shields, white arrows (which might mean direct attacks), and a couple of other icons. As you place particular cards down on the game board in the champion space, whatever the symbol on the card is (as previously mentioned), if the symbol matches what is on the champion symbol, it unlocks that champion symbol and rotates to the next. The symbol on the champion card is located on the top left of the card and the player must match the symbol of the card played to get credit and progress the rotation. If you match four symbols during a match on one particular champion, then it unlocks the special power of the champion, which could be very devastating to the opponent. So much strategy, so little time.
Now, the process of rotating these symbols seems easy, but the random draw of the card and the need to think strategically about your next move complicates the entire process. You will not easily unlock the champion powers, and don’t let them distract you from your ultimate goal of victory. It’s a balance that you can’t just willy-nilly run through. You must think through everything, which makes this gameplay design far more than just another card game. Don’t get me wrong, you should have some leeway to enjoy the game without thinking too hard about things, but having another layer of complication makes the game far deeper than most card game experiences.
All of this said I have gradually grown to enjoy the gameplay with Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions. It certainly does provide you with enough complication and motivation to keep playing it. In addition, the need to level up, get more decks, and improve how your strategy will keep you going with this game. The solo and online game modes will also help in this, though I enjoyed the solo game mode a bit more than online. The difficulty arc for the solo mode was consistent and helped expand my strategic-ness. It seemed more progressive and less frustrating, which also helps attach oneself to the game. Plus, I think I have a phobia about online gaming with the card genre, as I don’t like embarrassing myself, so solo was just a bit more up my alley.
Before everything wraps on this review, let me just say that I think the Switch was a solid platform for this title. I usually don’t have a lot of compliments for this platform, as I still don’t think that this is a serious system with longevity to it (especially, when the price point is comparable to more powerful hardware), but this card game mad this platform fun to use. This is the type of game that is perfect for ‘on-the-go’ gamers. In short, the Nintendo Switch is perfect for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions.
Overall, Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Champions is not your typical card game. It adds some simple rotation changes that end up adding a thick layer of strategy to the entire gameplay design. All of this sits on top of neat and well thought through card designs and is driven by a solid difficulty arc that forces you to learn the ins/outs of the gameplay.
